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Agony over prospect that Malaysia plane is never found

By The Associated Press

Posted:
03/19/2014 12:01:00 AM MDT

Updated:
03/19/2014 01:11:26 AM MDT

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — The plane must be somewhere. But the same can be said for Amelia Earhart's.

Ten days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 people aboard, an exhaustive international search has produced no sign of the Boeing 777, raising an unsettling question: What if the airplane is never found?

Such an outcome, while considered unlikely by many experts, would certainly torment the families of those missing. It would also flummox the airline industry, which will struggle to learn lessons from the incident if it doesn't know what happened.

"When something like this happens that confounds us, we're offended by it, and we're scared by it," said Ric Gillespie, a former U.S. aviation accident investigator who wrote a book about Earhart's still-unsolved 1937 disappearance over the Pacific Ocean. "We had the illusion of control, and it's just been shown to us that 'Oh, folks, you know what? A really big airliner can just vanish.' And nobody wants to hear that."

Part of the problem, said Andrew Thomas, the editor in chief of the Journal of Transportation Security, is that airline systems are not as sophisticated as many people might think. A case in point, he said, is that airports and airplanes around the world use antiquated radar tracking technology, developed in the 1950s, rather than modern Global Positioning Systems.

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The families of the missing, of course, would face the most painful consequences of a failed search.

"In any kind of death, the most important matter for relatives and loved ones is knowing the context and circumstances," said Kevin Tso, CEO of New Zealand agency Victim Support, which has been counseling family and friends of the two New Zealand passengers aboard the flight. "When there's very little information, it's very difficult."

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